People

Principal Investigator

Greg Gibson Trained as a geneticist at Sydney University undergraduate and the University of Basel PhD, followed by a Post-Doc at Stanford, Greg has been at a Professor in the School of Biology at Georgia Tech since 2009. His CV is available here: Gibson_CV_Jan2016

Lab Manager

Dalia Arafat-Gulick A graduate of Mississippi State University in Microbiology, Dalia has been running the lab since 2010. She is primarily responsible for all of the wet-lab experiments, manages/runs the GT Genome Analysis Fluidigm core facility, and serves as School of Biology liaison for the Research Faculty Senate. A Doctor of Chiropractic Medicine, she can straighten out just about any mess.

Post-Docs

Urko Martinez Marigorta A Basque/Spanish hybrid, Urko received his PhD from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona where he studied the consistency of GWAS signals across populations. Since 2013 he has been working on basic and applied aspects of RNASeq, developing the notion of a Transcriptional Risk Score (TRS), and investigating how Genetic Risk Scores by environment interactions could shape disease risk. He is also currently collaborating with Subra Kugathasan at Emory on ranscriptomics of Crohn’s Disease

PhD Graduate Students

Swetha Garimalla From Arkansas by way of Carnegie-Mellon and Michigan, Swetha is a Presidential Fellow interested in bioinformatics to interpret gene expression profiles in isolated immune cell types. She is currently working with Frances Lee and Inaki Sanz at Emory to understand the origin and function of long-lived plasma cells.

Biao Zeng Another Beijinger, on a Chinese Scholarship, Biao is primarily a statistical geneticist. His primary interest is multivariate eQTL mapping. The idea is that simultaneous fitting of two or more regulatory SNPs improves the estimation of their effect sizes and potentially generates better per locus estimates of allelic effects. He is collaborating on this with Joseph Powell and Peter Visscher at the University of Queensland, and Sudhir Kumar at Temple. Empirical validation of regulatory effects is being performed with Gang Bao at Rice University.

Diana Williams Diana is from originally from North Carolina, but has been working for the Army Criminal Investigation Service as a forensic scientist for the past decade. She received a SMART fellowship and has devised a unique microbiome project related to detection of sexual
assault for her thesis.

Khalid Alhuminidi Khalid is an BS-Bioinformatics student from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. He is working with Bahig Shehata at Emory on next-gen sequencing evaluation of the causes of pathology in Histiocytoid Cardiomyopathy and of Wilm’s tumor.

MS Graduate Students

Undergraduate Students

Samridhi Banskota A native of Nepal, Samridhi is a Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering student who is using CRISPR mutagenesis to study the regulation of KLF1 gene expression in erythrocytes, and the consequences of abnormal regulation for red blood cell development.